It being a slow news day and all, I’ve decided to take a moment out of my hectic afternoon to reflect on one of the most promising actors of 1999, Wes Bentley. A man so talented and flaming hot that, at the time, we tore down our Jonathan Taylor Thomas posters and had an artist come in to airbrush his face on our ceiling. (Which we eventually covered with a poster of The Belz.)
The Juillard-trained Bentley hadn’t crossed my mind in years, that is until last night at 3:00 am, when luck had me change the channel to TBS to catch the better half of American Beauty. And that’s when all the memories came flooding back to me: Those eyes, that smile, the quiet dignity… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to… aaaanyways.
A quick check of his IMDB profile shows that the actor took a four year hiatus after making The Four Feathers, more commonly known as Box Office Poison. Perhaps all the time spent reenacting a war in the Sudan instilled a fear of acting in the man, something I like to call “Post-Dramatic Stress Syndrome.” Since 2002, he found himself a wife and… that’s basically it. He’s married.
Why he wasn’t cast as Superman over the similar-in-looks but devoid-of-all-personality Brandon Routh is completely beyond me. But there is good news for Wes fans out there. He’s got a supporting role in the upcoming movie Ghost Rider, a movie where Nicolas Cage rides around on a motorcycle while setting his silky locks on fire. And it seems Wes has got three other movies in the hopper (though, admittedly, he’s the star of all three.)
Let’s hope ’07 will kick off many years of non-stop Bentleyness. The Belz is starting to freak us out already.
